The great adventures of a w-space dweller and his alts in Eve Online.Current project: Figuring out what's new after being away for half a year.

Monday, July 1, 2013

A C4 carebears dilemma

Day Four

After wasting time scanning routes to reunite my chars yesterday, I finally get to do some C4 plexing. I had four Frontier Barracks, two Information Sanctums, some Command Posts and a few Integrated Terminus that I could do. The Frontier Barracks is the preferred ones because you can do them without even switching drones, if you manage to snipe the three frigs in the last wave before they get to close, it's Bouncers all the way. Easy. The Command Posts demand much more work. Initial wave is best handled with warriors or hammers, and the cruisers in the second Gardes. The Information Sanctums is as scary as they come in C4, the second wave is four battleships, and the trigger, the Sleepless Safeguard both scram and neut you while the Sleepless Defenders do quite good damage. There's no warping out from that one if you cant handle it. I will most likely not be doing them in my double-Rattler setup.

After have killed and salvaged all the sites except for the Information Sanctums, the value-approximation on my loot-tab in the CHA reads just over 800M. Not to shabby for one days work. It remains to be seen if I can find the same efficiency when doing the sites in my static C4.

The current fit I'm running with is the one that sort of became the corp standard for PVE in Reconfiguration Nation. The power lies in the range you get from the Sentries, to be able to reach out to 100km and touch stuff with 700dps is amazing. It's what make the fit so efficient. Even if switching drones is a bit of a hassle, you can, so you will always have a way of dealing with sleepers, no matter what range or size.

Two of these can easily do any combat site in C4's with the exception of the Information Sanctums. They don't perma-tank all the spawns, but they kill them fast enough for it to not matter. Normally I just have to use one shield transport, which I lazily just put on each Rattler at the beginning of each site and then let run. Rarely do I need to micromanage the tank by adding a second repper.

The cap-bouncing is very effective (especially with good skills and the rig) and a good defence against the neuting. Double cap-bounce goes up first thing on warp-in and is not touched during the site.

If you got tree Rattlesnakes like this, you could most probably perma-tank any spawn in any C4 (including Wolf Rayets if you are feeling masochistic), but you would not need to because then you will have the dps to take down the spawns before they become a problem. In fact, with three ships the sleepers are dying so quick that things like lock-time, numbers of targets and focusing fire comes into effect.

So how much bling? By fitting cheap ass Rattlers you minimizing risk/reward ratio, but on the other hand you might end up losing a ship that you would not have lost if you had spent that extra on the tank.

Adding faction inv.fields would increase tanking enormously, both because of the extra resists, but also from the fact that you then get CPU to upgrade the shield transports to T2, which would increase the repping-power by 10%. But would it be worth it for me just to be able to do the Information Sanctums?